Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teamsâŚteams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. Well, it was always going to be hard for me to top episode 50 last week. We're a year into the podcast. We've had some terrific reception from the people out there that are listening. And once we get to such a major milestone like episode 50, sometimes it can get a little bit hard to have that motivation ready to jump into another set of podcast recordings. They take a lot of time, a lot of thinking, and they really do need you to be on your game.
So as I was sitting down preparing for this week, and in fact for the next three month block of podcasts, there's a few things that really dawned on me. The first one is the people that are listening to this podcast. The overwhelming feedback that I'm getting is that they love having a mixture of solo podcasts, so essentially me talking on my own, but also some interviews with other people. So we're going to continue that over the next three, six, nine, and twelve months. We'll see a mixture of both of those. The second piece was coming off the high of a 50th episode and some fantastic episodes with Steve Plummer and Darcy and Steve from By Why Bravo previously and a lot of other great guests, was what can I talk about today? That really lights me up? Because I think that will really come across as something that's so valuable on the other side of the table. Now, that's easy enough to say what lights me up, but I also then took that second step to say, well, hey, what's really valuable for salespeople and sales leaders, particularly at this time of year? The bit that came out loud and clear was strategic planning. It is something that every team does in some form, and I say in some form because they're often very different, both in the level of detail people place in, but how they're implemented. But also a lot of teams are doing it at this time of year as a great sense-check for where their business is at or have just completed it. So working through how to implement those strategic plans.
For me, the most common engagement I have with businesses across the country, and in fact globally too, is that I am engaged to help the team work out what their goals are, how they're going to execute them and achieve them, and what happens when things go wrong. So what better topic to talk through today than a nice format for strategic planning that you can use in any team, regardless of the size. Now, my one caveat before I get into today is that a template for strategic planning is fantastic. It helps guide a conversation and really gives you structure to make sure you're getting through what you need to in that strategic planning session. The upside is certainly that when you facilitate it and use a guide such as this, and you facilitate it yourself, it allows you to work through with relatively strong control of the process, work through it quickly and also avoid the need to hire in external people or use internal people within your organization to actually make the strategic planning happen.
The downside is that you spend a lot of time focusing on the implementation of the day, keeping on time, what's next, how you're going to collate data. And the real big downside, which is where I'm typically hired to help. Shameless plugâŚnot so sure. For me, it actually is around value, is that you are actually removed from that planning day, and it makes it a lot harder to really think and contribute value with your team as to how you're going to be moving ahead with a strategic planning process. So for me, it's something to really think long and hard about, and sometimes it will be one or the other option that works for this time, and at other times it'll be the other option that works. So there will be times when strategic planning is perfectly suited to be completed in house, and there'll be times when strategic planning is better suited to have an external facilitator. As a leader, you'll be able to work through that, but of course, you can always get in touch if you're not sure with me and I can give you some guidance.
But for today, what I want to do is provide you with a nice little template that you can use to run your strategic planning across now or the next time that you do it. So here's some of the non-negotiables that I would recommend around how you run the strategic planning before we get into the what you're talking about.
So number one is it needs to be in an area that you're not going to be distracted. So that could be on site, but it has to be somewhere where you can lock the team away together. Number two is, I would generally recommend that it is a day that is uninterrupted. So by that I mean you start at 8:00, 8:30, 9:00 o'clock, whatever works for your team and you run through the whole day with scheduled breaks in that day. I typically will run three breaks, a short morning tea, a chunky when I say chunky, lunch, half an hour to 45 minutes, and then an afternoon break. That allows the urgent issues to get sorted and people can feel they can attend to the session with their full presence outside of these times. The next thing is make sure your phones and your day to day urgent activities are handled. The number of times I've been to a strategic planning session and I've asked the question, hey, who's looking after the urgent for today? And the team look at each other and go, oh, we've forgotten to do that. So very important structurally that you're working through that. Third one is, the day is treated as a proper workday. This is really important because for me, my experience is when people come into strategic planning in too casual a mindset, the approach to the day from an intellectual point of view also becomes very casual. When people come in too formally for a strategic planning day, the thinking also becomes a little bit too formal and a little bit too rigid. So we want to treat the day as much as we can like a normal day so people are comfortable in an environment that they typically work in. Last but not least is where you can roll in some team building activities that don't take away from the planning. In fact, that they complement the planning - I've got some great activities that you're welcome to get in touch with if you'd like to know more about - but when they can complement the planning, it really does help bring the team together on the day as much, if not more, than going out for dinner afterwards.
Okay, so you've got your strategic planning sorted, you've picked a day, you've removed distractions, everyone's there, they're ready to go, and the day is set to run.
What's a great structure that you can use? So what I'm going to run through now is a very loose structure that I think will work for most businesses out there and certainly is one that I use as a go to at a macro level, but needs a significant amount of micro level planning to actually be implemented. So for me, around these strategic planning days, I will normally need a full day of preparation, even though I have a general outline in play. And that's to build context around what we need to deliver on the day. For you, as a leader who knows your business, I'm going to suggest it's probably more like a half day preparation. But make sure you've allowed that time because the more you prepare for these sessions, the better they generally run.
Okay, so the teams together, we're all ready to go. Let's say it's a 09:00 start. We've had time to get coffee. It's a day killer not having coffee available. I've seen strategy days run before where people don't get to get coffeeâŚugly! I'm not a coffee drinker, but I strongly recommend you make sure that happens in your warm up before you get started.
Okay, so the first session we've warmed up, everyone's sat down, we're in the room and ready to go. Typically, this is a business update that looks backwards at the year we've just completed. Now, I'm a big advocate for not letting the past control the future. However, we need to make sure there's some perspective around it so that we can roll both what's working for a business into the next year, and also make sure that we are tackling head on the challenges that the business has faced head to head over the last twelve months, that we can make sure we acknowledge and we look to do something about them in the coming year. So we'll generally look at following some highs and lows of the prior year where the business did things well, where the business struggled at. For example, we hit some great sales numbers, but our margin levels were not high enough or we didn't deliver projects well enough or customer retention was an issue. So we'll look at those areas that are still a work in progress. The next thing we'll do is have a look around a market update. So what's changing both within the business and when I mean that, what's changing in terms of structure, in particular, how teams engage with customers, people in positions is a big one. And any products, for example, we have coming to the market. So we look at those known changes within the business, but also any changes that are happening in our environment. A classic example of this is where we have regulatory changes or pricing changes. Very, very common right. We have a market shift in pricing because of currency movements, we have a market shift because of technological advancements. Or we have a market shift simply because a competitor has found a way to do something in a more cost effective manner. Right. So really this helps us down the track, look at our value equation, but we'll come to that. So we're looking at what's changing in the market, what's looking at changing in our business. And we're also profiling some of our competitors. It's something that everyone has done previously. I often see eye rolls at this point in time. But understanding our competitors allows us to learn where we might not be meeting the mark, or where we have advantages that at the moment can be driven home. So when you are able to spend some time looking backwards at your business, at the market and at your competitors, it allows us to take a summary of some of the key themes that have come out of there and put them in a car park to make sure we address them as we're going through our strategic planning for the coming year. So that type of session, normally for businesses, all of that will take anywhere from half an hour through to an hour and a half, depending on your business.
All right, the next area for me, when I'm working with businesses around goal setting, is the most important, and particularly when we're looking at a function of a business. So a sales team or a sales strategy within a business, what we need to be looking at is what are our macro-level goals for us over the next twelve months? Aligning these goals, first of all, back to business goals, is generally the starting point. But what we then tend to look at is what are the three to five things that have to go right within our team if we are to achieve success in the next twelve months? I call them strategic successes. It's a very common term for me - you can call them whatever you like. But if we can have a top line, three to five things that need to go right over the next twelve months, then it gives us something to focus on. Now, these strategic successes could look at anything from sales numbers through to how we execute out in the market, through to specific segments, geographies or types of products that we want to conquer. But we need to make sure they're at a macro enough level that if we achieve the three to five of them, we know that we are really confident that we will achieve the business level goals and essentially the sales budget that we've set for ourselves. Strong encouragement from me here to make sure there's something around people in the team and the learning and coaching and how the team can develop, as well as some of the harder goals around, sales numbers, margins, new market entries, those type of things. So we'll look at that, and that's a session that can go anywhere from 30 minutes through to about an hour and a half, depending on the preparation that teams have done.
So make sure we're throwing in a break somewhere in there, a morning tea break. But what we'll then do from there is we will sit down and say, okay, we have three to five really important goals within our business that we need to achieve. This is where the thinking gets real. What are all the ways that we can look at bringing those to life? So this is very much about ideation. It's about putting ideas out onto the table, throwing out anything we can think of. There's no such thing as a bad idea. I will say that, however, these ideas might not all get picked to be implemented, but it gives everyone a chance to be included in the ideation process. Now, this is probably a fantastic segue for me to talk about one of the best unintended consequences of strategic planning for sales teams that I've seen. And that is when we can involve the majority of our team in the strategic planning. When we're able to do this, what we find is that people are contributing to the strategic planning for the year ahead and feeling really valued. And what happens as a result of when people are contributing together to strategic planning or any action in life is that they are more likely to see it through. So I love having full sales teams together. I always encourage bringing as many people as you can into the strategic planning session. Open arms, expand it out to many, rather than closed arms behind closed doors, because it ensures that we have much greater buy in when we get out to rolling it out. That doesn't mean that everyone's ideas actually get put into play. And it's important to preface that when you're running strategic workshops, is to say that, hey, it's a chance for everyone to be heard. And the process, which is a democracy or an autocracy, if that's how you're running things. Right. But how the decision is made may not mean that those ideas come to life, but they certainly have the chance to present them. Very, very powerful and something I'm a huge believer in.
Okay, so we're running the ideation segment. We're looking at as many different ideas as we can to throw to each of the strategic successes that we've brought to life. That's a process, again, anywhere from 60 minutes to kind of 2 hours, depending on the size of the team, but super, super powerful to allow us to think without needing to worry about how we execute. Okay, so at this point in time, probably getting close to a lunch break, depending on how fast you've moved through them, you might move in another session, but you need to work through your timings yourself. I think we are very capable of doing that as sales leaders. But once we've had that session where we develop our strategic successes, our goals we have to hit and we've started to ideate about how we bring them to life, the next step is to actually look at those ideas and pick the best ones. Experience for me says it's very hard to roll out any more than about 30 to 40 ideas across all of your strategic successes over a year. Again, it depends on the size of those. There are generally going to be some really chunky ideas that go in there that will take a lot of time. And there'll often be some ideas that are quick and easy, like updating your marketing collateral, implementing pricing reviews on a monthly basis, rolling out a training program right, for everyone in the team. There's some very common things that come out of this, but my encouragement here is to make sure that you are focusing on ideas that help the business so you have internal business improvements, you have ideas or initiatives that help the team, so they're helping the sales team deliver. And very, very importantly is we're focusing on initiatives that are driving value for our customers. I commonly talk about the customer with a capital C. Right. Often we hear businesses talk about the customer being at the center of everything they do. This is where you actually get to put that into practice, because when your ideas are focused on how you drive the most value for your customers, you are automatically putting yourself into a position where you become easier to work with. And a huge proponent of what every sales team should be doing is working through how they can make the decisions easy or an instant âYes.â Thank you, Justine Beauregard. An instant âYesâ right as to how they can work with them. So this synthesis session where we actually work through all the ideas on the table and try and bring them down to 20 to 40 ideas, that's normally going to take, again, kind of 45 minutes to an hour or so, by which point in time we actually should have our key strategic successes and then a hit list of ideas that we want to bring to life. If you haven't had lunch by this time, please make sure the team go and take some. I really encourage you to make sure your lunch is a light. The number of times, and I have run dozens and dozens and dozens of strategic planning workshops. The number of times I see a heavy lunch come in and eyes start to droop after lunch, I cannot tell you. Light lunch, keep people focused and get moving into the next part of the day.
Okay, so this is where things get real. Once we have our 20 to 40 ideas across our three to five key strategic successes, it's now time to bring them to life. So we organize those ideas, those 20 to 40 ideas, our best ideas, and we bucket them into the three to five strategic successes that we have. Once we've done this, what we want to start doing is planning how we're going to bring them to life. So what the action steps are, who's going to be doing them, what's the next step, when's it due? And most importantly, what does success look like? So if our goal is to build a training program, so if our strategic success is to make sure that we have the most educated and technically proficient sales team in the market, and one of the goals is a weekly training program, our action items will be something along the lines of: develop an annual training program. It's done by Ben Wright. It's due in four weeks time, and the next steps are to build the structure and fill out the first three months of the program. What does success look like? Well, success looks like having our first training session rolled out and our following training sessions booked in and locked into the diary. Another example of this might be we have a strategic success that is around improving our close rates. An action item that might come out of that is looking at how we can better qualify leads. Next item might be looking at five questions that we need to be asking customers before we quote them with the task being assigned to Ben Wright. I'm getting a few tasks here, a due date next week, and success looks like a three month review where we see that our qualifying questions have led to a higher number of quotes that come from customer meetings. Right. Fantastic. Hopefully you get the gist on that. If you don't. This is by far the most important part of strategic planning. And please get in touch with me. This is also the part where you being part of the session is really valuable because you get to contribute without needing to worry about keeping it moving forward. So we've done the playbook now, this session will take anywhere from one to 3 hours depending on how many initiatives you have. And this is often where strategic planning will roll into two days. I would do on average two thirds of my strategic planning would be done across a single day and about a third would happen over two days. Very, very common and perfectly normal. Where we have a two day session, I generally will tend to break the teams out a lot more so they can work in subgroups and really start thinking about what's next.
Okay, so once we've got that playbook ready, from there, the rest of the day, we have a little bit of time to do some free form activities. So these are things like what type of interfunctional collaboration do we need to happen? What are the systems, symbols and norms that we need to bring out in our strategies to bring them to life? Do we look at our sales process? Do we look at our sales metrics? Do we start to consider how we're going to execute our training program and the commitments that we make at a team? Right, so these are our ways of working where we might have ten of these that we put up and we commit to them as a team. Very, very important at this point in time to start looking at our people. What are we doing to make sure that the people within the team are having their say about how the business can be run, or at the very least, getting their ideas forward? I love the if âI was CEO for a dayâ activity where people get to put forward ideas that get sent through to senior management. This is also a good time if you want to run a really specific session, something around key account management or objection handling or something that, you know, the team would really value a pure block of training on. You're really going to need to work your times here as to how much you have. But certainly there's some powerful pieces that can come into these last few hours of strategic planning. Again, making sure that you've got a break in there to allow people to get to urgent calls, but also gives you a head start on your program.
Last but not least, the wrap up, right? This is where we get quite binary for a small period of time and we start to think about what we're going to do next. These are the holistic action steps that we need to take. For me, getting these down, getting things down, like, we agree that we will meet our time commitments and if we can't, we are going to speak up early. Things like putting the action items from strategic planning into our project management software, or putting them into our one to ones, our templates that we run through regularly. This is how we start to work out how we're going to make sure we deliver.
It's also a great point and hopefully you've had some fun during the day, right? These days are meant to be creative, so if you can't have fun within them, then they can get a bit stale. But this is the end of the day where you have things like best presenter, best idea, worst joke, or little awards that can really bring people together and hopefully you roll off into dinner, particularly if you've got a team together and then be able to spend some time together. The question I'm often asked from teams is do we do strategic planning together or do we run in a hybrid environment where everyone's off site? The answer here for me is it depends. But I always lead with if we can get people together in a cost effective manner that works well for the team, Ie. That's within our normal cadence of activity, then we get together normally. You'll see there's some people that tend to come in remotely, but I encourage those people to do so because it's due to a geographic reason rather than they're simply not able to get in for the day. There is huge value in these sessions, particularly around ideation, to have people face to face. It's also a fantastic opportunity to take on some team building.
Okay, so there we have it. That's a nine hour strategy day. We meet together, we start to look backwards, just for a short period of time at what the business has achieved over the last twelve months. In our challenges, we do a market review and a competitor review. We set some really clear strategic success goals, the three to five things we must get right to achieve the broader business goals. We then start to ideate around these goals, bring them together in a synthesis to pick the best of those ideas, and then get really binary as to how we're going to deliver those. Once we finish that, that gives us some freeform time to be able to look at what we're doing for our people, our training programs, the systems, symbols and norms and the ways of working to bring that to life and anything else that can be important for our team now. At the end, we're then coming together and saying here's what we're going to do next and making sure that happens.
Fantastic framework for strategic planning. I love it. I have done, as I said, dozens and dozens and dozens of these and it is a go-to framework that works for the majority of teams. Before we wrap up on it, though, I just want to reiterate the importance of doing your preparation. I still do a full day's work for one of these before we roll it out. You cannot certainly just rock up and roll these out, because when they go off track. Wow, do these go off track. But when they're powerful, they are one of the best initiatives that I see run with sales teams. Okay, so that's it from a sales strategic workshop point of view today.
But before I leave, as always, I want to talk a little bit about some of the health and fitness tips that I've been giving. I really want to make sure they're running this year. And a program that I've been trialing is around intermittent fasting. It really is a bit of a buzz topic at the moment, and we're seeing lots of people do it. But for me, as someone who's very physically active, but also who leads a demanding job and sales leaders, I think, have a very demanding job, I wanted to see how it fitted with life to be able to keep up energy levels. So I tried 12, 18, and 24 hours fastings a number of times. And here are the results in a very compact form as to how they work for me.
So 12-hour fasting. This was a fantastic discipline to stop me going to the cookie jar at night. It meant that I had dinner, ate nothing further, woke up, did my exercise, and was eating breakfast with good strong energy levels powering into the day. The biggest benefit I found here was that I was able to stop my consumption of food really ramping after dinner. Great for energy levels. Didn't see any drop off. And it's something that I actually practice quite frequently.
Second one, the 18-hour fast again one. I found that where here I'd stop eating dinner and then I'd start again at lunchtime. I found this needed a little bit more organization, but most mornings I was very sharp. I was very sharp once I got to work and I had a really strong block of work in the morning because of my mental clarity. I did, however, need to remind myself to eat once it came to midday. And for me, because I'm so active, I needed to still get the calories in during the day. So I did that in a block of that six to eight hour window, but worked very well from a mental clarity point of view, with a little bit more organization.
Last but not least was a 24-hour fast. So this went from dinner to dinner and wow, it took some organizing on my behalf and wasn't something I could do when I had a heavy day of training. But what I found was actually the days after I did the 24 hours fast, I was quite sharp. 24 to 48 hours after I was ahead of where I normally would be from a mental clarity point of view. However, that difference wasn't substantially more significant than the 18-hour fast, so I queried whether or not that was worth it.
So for me, where have I ended up? I've ended up doing a twelve hour fast most days, so I aim to have 12 hours not eating as many days as I can. It restricts me eating sweet stuff at nighttime and has really strong energy levels for me. The second thing I do is I throw in an 18-hour fast once a week because that really helps me focus when I have some important tasks to do and I line up strategic planning or strategic tasks in those days. But it also gives my body a really serious break without dropping my energy levels. The 24-hour fast, I don't do that as often because I didn't find the difference as significant.
Now, I'm certainly no expert in this, but I wanted to share some practical results from what it meant for a really active, professional and exercise-driven person to how it could impact my life. I encourage you to look at the science and go and take lots of advice from other people, but I think it's always nice to hear from others how things work for them. I don't know how it'll impact my longevity, but certainly my health and wellbeing now is thanking me for what I'm doing.
Okay, so that's it for today. If you need to find me, LinkedIn is the best place to do it. I get across all of the messaging that comes into the business, whether it be email, LinkedIn, or any other form of social media. So please get in touch if you'd like to know more. We're @strongersalesteams on most platforms and would love to hear from you.
That's it for now, though. I look forward to seeing everyone again next week and keep living in a world of possibility because you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.
Episode 51: Set Your Team Up for Success: The Strategic Planning Workshop Blueprint
